You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.